Page 38 of Into the West

“We saved you supper,” said Alberdina, reaching for the ladle to dish her share out of the pot.

“I made you a little jam pie,” said Sai.

Endars just got up and gestured to a spot at the fire where someone had placed some cushions on the ground and against a piece of log that could be used as a backrest. She wobbled her way over to it and sat down. A moment later, she had a bowl of duck-and-barley soup in her hands, and was balancing a pocket-pie on her knee.

Conversation resumed where she must have interrupted it. The bowl was about twice as much as she usually ate, but she not only downed it like a greedy little pig, she felt as if she could have done with another serving. But there was that pocket-pie, so she began eating that with slow bites. Normally something like this would have been so sweet it would have made her teeth ache, but tonight it just tasted delicious.

When she had finished, Alberdina handed her a cup of tea. “Well,” the Healer said. “That was an impressive move.”

“I never want to have to do that again,” she replied. “I wouldn’t have been able to hit him with a third deluge.”

Sai nodded, and waggled his thick white eyebrows. “Well, that served three purposes. Now you know you can, now you know how many times in a row you can, and you did a very good job of scaring off the bear.”

“He’s probably swearing at you in bear, still,” joked Venidel.

That made her smile. “I’m sorry I couldn’t think of a way to kill him for you, Sai,” she added apologetically. “I know the fat would have come in handy.”

He waved his hand in the air. “Not sure I would have trusted it was fit to eat. And now that you have filled your empty belly, you should probably get back to bed.”

“Use the patient’s bunk,” ordered Alberdina as Delia got shakily to her feet. “No point in you risking a fall trying to get into your own.”

“You’re right. Thank you,” she replied, and somehow staggered back into the barge, got undressed, voided, cleaned, and crawled into the lower berth. At least, she thought that was what she’d done, because she didn’t actually remember doing any of it when she woke the next morning with the savory smell of breakfast stew and fresh bread in her nose.

“A lizard-bear?” Kordas asked Rose incredulously. She tilted her head to the side.

“I merely say what Amethyst saw,” she replied.

Kordas had been wolfing down a late luncheon of trail bread up at the head of the convoy, sitting just off the path on a boulder as a flock of mixed sheep and goats flowed slowly past him, heads down, snatching at weeds and grasses as they walked. Then Rose had interrupted that brief respite with the announcement that the scouts remaining at the base camp were in danger.

As he leapt to his feet—futile, of course, since there wasn’t anything he could have done—Rose continued to describe the crisis in clinical detail. And it was over much more quickly than he would have dreamed possible.

And, to his intense relief, without anything more than Delia getting cramps from over-using her Gift.

“Oh, I don’t doubt you, but . . .” He shook his head. “This is nothing we were prepared for. Bears yes, but it sounds like this thing could have thrown a Tow-Beast.” He suppressed the urge to mount up anyway, and send Arial off after his scouting party at a gallop. He’d never get there in time to help with anything. In fact, he could probably gallop for two days before he reached them. So the only thing he’d do would be to take himself away from his duties and the bulk of his people who looked to him for leadership. Doesn’t exactly show good leadership to leave them, does it?

Oh, but Delia rose to the challenge. Sending her off had been exactly the right thing to do. He had decided that she needed to have something to concentrate on besides her infatuation with him, and it certainly seemed that not only had his plan worked, she’d discovered a lot of ways that he hadn’t even considered to make herself a full member of the scouts.

I can’t make the excuse that I didn’t know what we were getting into, because the further you go into the west, the more remains of that ancient war you find. It makes sense that if Change-Circles can cut sections out of trees, anything that blunders into one is in danger of being affected by the magic that made them. Whatever that was. No one knew much about that war, distant in time and space alike. Only that the mages who had waged it had been far more powerful than any in the Empire, now or ever.

“Have you Dolls passed this on to anyone else?” he asked Rose, who shook her head. “Keep it to the Five Old Men, then. I’d better tell Isla about this myself.” I only hope she won’t skin me for letting Delia go off into a dangerous situation.

There was a gap in the herds, enough to allow him and Rose to get to his horse and mount into the saddle. Once atop Arial, it was a lot easier to push their own way against the flow of sheep, goats, and swine than it would have been afoot.

But easier didn’t mean fast. It was nearly supper, and vessels slowed and bunched tighter. People were stopping for the night, anchoring their barges to the bank, unharnessing and rubbing their beasts of burden, and setting up the group kitchen barges to make their nightly food. It was a touch surprising to him that he never picked up quite the same scents as he moved past those barges. No two barges in a row seemed to be making the same things. Honestly, he loved it. Regional dishes normally not found near each other blended their scents with each other in ways that ranged from shocking to seductive.

Some were better than others . . . but at this point in the migration, the really bad cooks had been weeded out and replaced—sometimes at cleaver-point!—with people who were at least competent at more than boiling water.

He was late for his own supper, but that was all right. It wasn’t the first time, and it wouldn’t be the last. In fact, by the time Arial had picked her way through the herds, all the animals were bedding down in the vicinity of the barges they were “tied” to, and they complained when they were disturbed. And even though his particular string of barges didn’t have any herds immediately associated with it, there were just so blasted many animals associated with this convoy that they filled up all the available space and were happily munching away as far into the woods as their “tethers” would let them go. And with most of them settling down close to their “comfort zone,” that meant his household barges, which contained his family and all the families and individuals associated with the manor, were knee-deep in sheep.

Well, this keeps the boys from slipping out at night. Not that the sheep would have stopped them, but they’d object to being disturbed, and all three of the boys were distinctly averse to stepping in manure. Sheep and goat wasn’t bad, but cattle and equines produced shit you could lose a shoe in, and pig was uniquely unpleasant. Not to mention, it was hard enough for a grown man like himself to wade through the livestock, so the boys would have been unable to see far and would have wound up lost not a barge-length away.

He did his duty to Arial, left her with a grain bag on her nose, and turned her loose. One of the grooms would take it off in a candlemark or so. Only then did he finally set foot on his own barge. The boys hurled themselves at his legs, and told him all the exciting things that their “Captain of the Page Army” was having them do. Mostly collecting wood and bringing it to the barge strings, where older boys who could be trusted with a hand-axe chopped it up into pieces small enough to feed the stoves. But they were learning all manner of things about the herds around them, and Kordas reckoned that was, at this point in time, more useful than any lessons they could get from books. He sat down at the tiny table while they bounced and babbled around him, and ate the leftover soup and flatbread, using a touch of his own magic to warm it up again. Isla let them babble away, because he got a lot of pleasure out of listening to them, sorting out their tiny problems, and answering their questions, although he was privately thanking his gods that they didn’t seem interested in the scouts or Delia tonight.

Isla’s prediction that the “Page Army” was going to run them out of energy had proven to be true. Every time he got back to the home barge, they fell on him like a pack of otters, but they soon wore out, and by the time he and Isla were using another touch of magic to clean everything up and store it for tomorrow, they were yawning between sentences, and the littlest had actually sat himself down on the floor, knuckling his eyes.

“Do you want a story from Mama, or me?” he asked them, looking into three pairs of big brown eyes fighting to keep from closing.

“Mama,” said Jon. “It’s my turn to pick and I want Mama.”